Introduction
From The Oxford Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

ToniMorrison

Fear and alarm
are what I remember most about my first encounter with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Palpable alarm. Unlike the treasure island ending signaled or
guaranteed excursionof Tom
Sawyer, at no point along Huck's journey was a happy ending signaled or
guaranteed.Reading Huckleberry Finn, chosen randomly
without guidance or recommendation, was deeply disturbing. My second
reading of it, under the supervision of an English teacher in junior
high school, was no less uncomfortable-- rather more. It provoked a
feeling I can only describe now as muffled rage, as though appreciation
of the work required my complicity in and sanction of something
shaming. Yet the satisfactions were great: riveting episodes of flight,
of cunning; the convincing commentary on adult behavior, watchful and
insouciant; the authority of a child's voice in language cut for its
renegade tongue and sharp intelligence.Liberating language-- not baby talk for the
young, nor the doggedly patronizing language of so many books on the
"children's shelf." And there were interesting female characters: the
clever woman undeceived by Huck's disguise; the young girl whose sorrow
at the sale of slaves is grief for a family split rather than
conveniences lost.

Nevertheless,
for the second time, curling through the pleasure,clouding the narrativereward,was my original alarm,couplednow with
a profoundlydistasteful complicity.

Then, in the
mid-fifties, I read it again-- or sort of read it. Actually I read it
through the lenses of Leslie Fiedler and Lionel Trilling. Exposed to
Trilling's reverent intimacy and Fiedler's irreverent familiarity, I
concluded that their criticisms served me better than the novel had,
not only because they helped me see many things I had been unaware of,
but precisely because they ignored or rendered trivial the things that
caused my unease.

In the early
eighties I read Huckleberry Finn again, provoked, I
believe, by demands to remove the novel from the libraries and required
reading lists of public schools. These efforts were based, it seemed to
me, on a narrow notion of how to handle the offense Mark Twain's use of
the term "nigger" would occasion for black students and the corrosive
effect it would have on white ones. It struck me as a puristyet
elementary kind of censorshipdesigned to
appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution. A serious comprehensive
discussion of the term by an intelligentteachercertainly
would have benefited my eighth-grade class and would have spared all of
us (a few blacks, many whites-- mostly second-generation immigrant
children) some grief. Name calling is a plague of childhood and a learnedactivity
ripe for discussion as soon as it surfaces. Embarrassing as it had been
to hear the dread word spoken, and therefore sanctioned, in class, my
experience of Jim's epithet had little to do with my initial
nervousness the book had caused. Reading "nigger" hundreds of times
embarrassed, bored,annoyed--
but did not faze me. In this latest reading I was curious about the
source of my alarm-- my sense that danger lingeredafter the story ended.

I was powerfully
attracted to the combination of delight and fearful agitation lying
entwined like crossed fingers in the pages. And it was significant that
this novel which had given so much pleasure to young readers was also
complicated territory for sophisticatedscholars.

Usually the
divide is substantial: if a story that pleased us as novice readers
does not disintegrateas
we grow older, it maintains its value only in its retellingfor other novices or to summonuncapturablepleasure as playback. Also, the books that academic
critics find consistently rewarding are works only partially available
to the minds of young readers.Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn manages to close that divide, and one of the
reasons it requires no leap is that in addition to the reverencethe novel
stimulates is its ability to transform its contradictions into fruitfulcomplexitiesand
to seem to be deliberatelycooperatingin the controversyit
has excited. The brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is
that it is the argument it raises.

My 1980s
reading, therefore, was an effort to track the unease, nail it down,
and learn in so doing the nature of my troubled relationship to this
classic American work.

Although its
language-- sardonic, photographic, persuasively aural-- andthe structural use of the river as controland chaos seem to me quite the major feats of Huckleberry Finn, much of the novel's genius lies in its
quiescence, the silences that pervade it and give it a porousquality that is by turnsbroodingand soothing. It lies in the approaches to and
exits from action; the byways and inlets seen out of the corner of the
eye: the subdued images in which the repetition of a simple word, such
as "lonesome," tolls like an evening bell; the moments when nothing is
said, when scenes and incidents swell the heart unbearably precisely
because unarticulated, and force an act of imagination almost against
the will. Some of the stillness, in the beautifully rendered eloquence
of a child, is breathtaking. "The sky looks ever so deep when you lay
down on your back in the moonshine" (59). "…. it was big trees all
about, and gloomy in there amongst them. There was
freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the
leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little" (61). Other moments, however, are frightening
meditations on estrangement and death. Huck records a conversation he
overhears among happy men he cannot see but whose voices travel from
the landing over the water to him. Although he details what the men
say, it is how distant Huck is from them, how separated he is from
their laughing male camaraderie, that makes the scene memorable.
References to death, looking at it or contemplating it are numerous.

... thisdrownded man
was just his [Pap's] size, ... but they couldn't make nothingout of the face ... floating on his back in
the water.... took him and buried him on the bank .... I knowed mighty well that a drownded
man don't float on his back, but on his face (30).

The emotional
management of death seeds the novel: Huck yearns for death, runs from
its certainty and feigns it. His deepest, uncomic
feelings about his status as an outsider, someone "dead" to society,
are murmuring interludes of despair, soleness,
isolation and unlove. A plaintive note of
melancholy and dread surfaces immediately in the first chapter, after
Huck sums up the narrative of his life in a prior book.

Then I set
down in a chair by the windowand triedto think of
something cheerful,but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesomeI most wished I was dead. Thestars were
shining,and the leaves rustled in the
woods everso mournful; and I heard an
owl, away off, who-whooing about somebodythat was dead, and a whippowilland a dog crying about somebodythat was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper
somethingto me and I couldn't make out
what it was,and so it madethe coldshiversrun over me. Thena way out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound
that a ghost makes.... I got so downhearted and scared I did wish I had
some company. (20)

Although Huck
complains bitterly of rules and regulations, I see him to be running
not from external control but from external chaos. Nothing in society
makes sense; all is in peril. Upper-class,churchgoing,
elegantly housed families annihilate themselves in a psychotic feud,
and Huck has to drag two of their corpses from the water-- one of whom
is a just-made friend, the boy Buck; he sees the public slaughter of a
drunk; he hears the vicious plans of murderers on a wrecked steamboat;he spends a large portion of the book in the
company of "[Pap's]kind of people"
(166)-- the fraudulent, thieving Duke and King who wield brutal power
over him, just as his father did. No wonder that when he is alone,
whether safe in the Widow's house or hiding from his father, he is so
very frightened and frequently suicidal.

If the emotional
environment into which Twain places his protagonist is dangerous, then
the leading question the novel poses for me is,
What does Huck need to live without terror, melancholy and suicidal
thoughts? The answer, of course, is Jim. When Huck is among society--
whether respectable or deviant, rich or poor-- he is alert to and
consumed by its deception, its illogic, its scariness. Yet he is
depressed by himself and sees nature more often as fearful. But when he
and Jim become the only "we," the anxiety is outside, not within. "We
would watch the lonesomeness of the river... for about an hour... Just
solid lonesomeness” (158). Unmanageable terror gives way to a pastoral,
idyllic, intimate, timelessness minus the hierarchy of age, status or
adult control. It has never seemed to me that, in contrast to the
entrapment and menace of the shore, the river itself provides this
solace. The consolation, the healing properties Huck longs for, is made
possible by Jim's active, highly vocal affection. It is in Jim's
company that the dread of contemplated nature disappears, that even
storms are beautiful and sublime, that real talk-- comic, pointed,
sad-- takes place. Talk so free of lies it produces an aura of
restfulness and peace unavailable anywhere else in the novel.

Pleasant as this
relationship is, suffused as it is by a lightness they both enjoy and a
burden of responsibility both assume,it cannotcontinue.
Knowing the relationship is discontinuous, doomed to separation, is (or
used to be) typical of the experience of white/black childhood
friendships (mineincluded),
and the cry of inevitable rupture is all the more anguished by being
mute. Every reader knows that Jim will be dismissed without explanation
at some point; that no enduring adult fraternity will emerge.
Anticipating this loss may have led Twain to the over-the-top minstrelization of Jim. Predictable and common
as the gross stereotyping of blacks was in nineteenth-century
literature, here, nevertheless, Jim's portrait seems unaccountably
excessive and glaring in its contradictions-- like an ill-made clown
suit that cannothide
the man within. Twain's black characters were most certainly based on
real people. His nonfiction observations of and comments on "actual"
blacks are full of references to their guilelessness, intelligence,
creativity, wit, caring, etc.None is
portrayed as relentlessly idiotic. Yet Jim is unlike, in many ways, the
real people he must have been based on.

There may be
more than one reason for this extravagance. In addition to
accommodating a racist readership, writing Jim so complete a buffoon
solves the problem of "missing" him that would have been unacceptable
at the novel's end, and helps to solve another problem: how effectively
to bury the father figure underneath the minstrel paint.

The foregone
temporariness of the friendship urges the degradation of Jim (to divert
Huck's and ourinadvertent
sorrow at the close),and minstrelizing him necessitates and exposesan enforced silenceon
the subject of white fatherhood.

The withholdings
at critical moments, which I once took to be deliberate evasions,
stumbles even, or a writer's impatience with his or her material, I began to see as otherwise: as
entrances, crevices, gaps, seductive invitations flashing the
possibility of meaning.Unarticulated
eddies that encourage diving into the novel's undertow-- the real place
where writer captures reader. An excellent example of what is available
in this undertow is the way Twain comments on the relationship between
the antebellum period in which the narrative takes place and the later
period in which the novel was composed. The 1880s saw the collapse of
civil rights for blacks as well as the publication of Huckleberry
Finn. This collapse was an effort to bury the combustible issues
Twain raised in his novel. The nation, as well as Tom Sawyer, was
deferring Jim's freedom in agonizing play. The cyclical attempts to
remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim's captivity on intoeach generation
of readers.

Or consider
Huck's inability to articulate his true feelings for Jim to anybody
other than the reader. When he "humbles himself" in apology to Jim for
the painful joke he plays on him, we are not given the words.Even to Tom, the only other friend he has and
the only one his own age, he must mask his emotions. Until the
hell-or-heaven choice, Huck can speak of the genuine affection and
respect for Jim that blossoms throughout
the narrative only aslant, or comically to the reader-- never directly
to any character or to Jim himself. While Jim repeatedly iterates his
love, the depth of Huck's feelings for Jim is stressed, underscored and
rendered unimpeachable by Twain's calculated use of speechlessness. The
accumulated silences build to Huck's ultimate act of love, in which he
accepts the endangerment of his soul. These silences do not appear to
me of merely historical accuracy-- a realistic portrait of how a white
child would respond to a black slave; they seem to be expert technical
solutionsto the narrative'scomplexities and, by the way, highly prophetic
descriptions of contemporary negotiationsbetweenraces.

Consider the
void that follows the revelation of Jim as a responsible adult and
caring parent in chapter23.
Huck has nothing to say. The chapter does not close; it simply stops.
Blanketed by eye dialect, placed auspiciously at chapter's end, held
up, framed, as it were, for display by Huck's refusal to comment, it is
one of the most moving remembrances in American literature. Then comes the "meanwhile-back-at-the ranch" first
line of the next chapter. The hush between these two chapters thunders.
And its roar is enhanced by Huck's observation on the preceding page:
that although Jim's desperate love for his wife and children "don't
seem natural," Huck "reckon[s] it's so" (201). This comment is
fascinating less for its racism than for the danger it deflects from
Huck himself. Huck has never seen nor experienced a tender, caring
father-- yet he steps out of this well of ignorance to judge Jim's role
as a father.

What I read into
this observation and the hiatus that follows Jim's confirmation of his
"naturalness" is that the line of thought Jim's fatherhood might
provoke cannot be pursued by the author or his protagonist for fear of
derailing the text into anotherstory or destabilizing its center (this is Huck's
adventure,not Jim's). It invites serious
speculation about fatherhood-- its expectations and ramifications-- in
the novel. First of all, it's hard not to notice that except for Judge Thatcherall of the
white men who might functionas father
figures for Huck are ridiculedfor their
hypocrisy, corruption, extreme ignorance and/or violence. Thus Huck's
"no comment" on Jim's status as a father works eitheras a comfortable evasion for or as a critiqueof a white readership, as well as being one of the gags
Twain shoves in Huck's mouthto protect
him from the line of thought neither he nor Twain can safely pursue.

As an abused and
homeless child running from a feral male parent, Huck cannot dwell on
Jim's confession and regret about parental negligence without
precipitating a crisis from which neitherhe nor the text could recover. Huck's
desire for a father who is adviser and trustworthy companion is
universal, but he also needs something more: a father whom, unlike his
own, he can control. No white man can serve all three functions. If the
runaway Huck discovered on the island had been a white convict with
protective paternal instincts, none of this would work, for there could
be no guarantee of controland
no games-playing nonsense concerning his release at the end. Only a
black male slave can deliver all Huck desires. Because Jim can be
controlled, it becomes possible for Huck to feel responsible for and to
him-- but without the onerous burden of lifelong debt that a real father figure would demand. For Huck, Jim
is a father-for-free. This delicate, covert and fractious problematic
is thus hidden and exposed by litotes and speechlessness, both of which
are dramatic ways of begging attention.

Concerningthis
matter of fatherhood,there are two other
instances of silence­-- one remarkable for its warmth, the other for
its glacial coldness. In the first, Jim keeps silent for practically
four-fifths of the book about having seen Pap's corpse. There seems no
reason for this withholding except his concern for Huck's emotional
well-being. Although one could argue that knowing the menace of his
father was over might relieve Huck enormously, it could also be argued
that dissipating that threat would remove the principal element of the
necessity for escape-- Huck's escape, that is. In any case, silence on
this point persists and we learn its true motive in the penultimate
paragraph in the book. And right there is the other speech void-- cold
and shivery in its unsaying. Jim tells Huck that his money is safe
because his father is dead.

"Doan' you
'member de house dat was float'n down de river, en deywuz a man in dah kivered
up, en I went in en unkivered him and didn' let you come in? ... datwuz him" (365-66).

Huck says and
thinks nothing about it. The following sentence, we are to believe, is
Huck's very next thought: "Tom's most well now...."

As a reader I am
relieved to know Pap is no longer a menace to his son's well-being, but
Huck does not share my relief. Again the father business is erased.
What after all could Huck say? That he is as glad as I am? That would
not do. Huck's decency prevents him from taking pleasure in anybody's
death. That he is sorry? Wishes his father were alive? Hardly. The
whole premise of escape while fearing and feigning death would
collapse, and the contradictionwould be unacceptable. Instead the crevice widens
and beckons reflection on what this long-withheld information means.
Any comment at this juncture, positive or negative, would lay bare the
white father/whiteson
animosity and harm the prevailing though illicit black father/whiteson bonding that has already taken place.

Such profoundly
realized and significant moments, met with startling understatement or
shocking absence of any comment at all, constitute the entrances I
mentioned earlier­-- the invitation Twain offers that I could not
refuse.

Earlier I posed
the question, What does Huck need to live without despair and thoughts
of suicide? My answer was, Jim. There is another question the novel
poses for me: What would it take for Huck to live happily without Jim?
That is the problem that gnarls the dissolution of their relationship.
The freeing of Jim is withheld, fructified, top-heavy with pain,
because without Jim there is no more book,
no more story to tell.

There is a
moment when it could have happened, when Jim, put ashore at Cairo,
would have gone his way, leaving Huck to experience by himself the
other adventures that follow. The reasons they miss Cairo are: there
are only saplings to secure the raft; the raft tears away; Huck
"couldn't budge" for half a minute;Huck forgetshe has
tied the canoe, can't "hardly do anything" with his hands and loses
time releasing it; they are envelopedin a
"solid white fog"; and for a reason even Huck doesn't understand, Jim
does not do what is routine in foggy weather-- beat a tin pan to signal
his location. (115-16). During the separation Huck notes the "dismal
and lonesome" scene and searches for Jim until he is physically
exhausted. Readers are as eager as he is to locate Jim, but when he
does, receiving Jim's wild joy, Huck does not express his own. Rather,
Twain writesin
the cruel joke that first sabotages the easily won relief and sympathy
we feel for Jim, then leads Huck and us to a heightenedrestoration of his stature.A
series of small accidents prevents Jim's exit from the novel, and Huck
is given the gift of an assertive as well as already loving black
father. It is to the father, not the nigger, that he "humbles" himself.

So therewill be no
"adventures" withoutJim. The risk is too
great. To Huck and to the novel. When the end does come, when Jim is
finally, tortuously,unnecessarily
freed, able now to be a father to his own children,Huck runs.Not back to the
town-- even if it is safe now-- but a further run, for the "territory."
And if thereare
complications out there in the world,Huck,
we are to assume, is certainlyready for
them.He has had a first-rate education in
social and individual responsibility, and it is interesting to note
that the lessons of his growing but secret activism begin to be
punctuated by speech, not silence, by moves towardtruth, ratherthan
quick lies.

When the King
and Duke auctionPeterWilks's slaves, Huck is moved by the
sorrow of Wilks's nieces-- which is caused
not by losing the slaves but by the blasting of the family.

. . . along about noon-time, the girls' joy got the
first jolt. A couple of nigger-traders come along, and the king sold
them the niggers reasonable, for three-daydrafts
as they called it, and away they went, the two sons up the river to
Memphis, and their motherdown the river
to Orleans. I thoughtthempoor girls and them niggers would break their
hearts for grief; they cried around each other, and took on so it most
made me down sick to see it. The girls said they hadn'tever dreamedof seeing the
family separated or sold away from the
town....The thing made a big stir in the town, too, and a good many
come out flatfootedand said it was
scandalous to separate the mother and the children that way. (234-35)

Later, when Huck
sees Mary Jane Wilks with "her face in her
hands, crying," he knows what is bothering her even before he asks her
to tell him about it. "And it was the niggers-- I just expectedit." I
think it is important to note that he is responding to the separation
of parents and children. When Mary Jane sobs, "Oh, dear, dear, to think
they ain'tever going to see
each otherany more!"
Huck reacts so strongly he blurts out a part of the truth just to
console her. "But they will-- and inside of two weeks-- and I know it"
(240).Her dismay over the most grotesque consequencesof
slavery catapults him into one of his most matureand
difficult decisions-- to abandon silence and chance the truth.

The change from
underground activist to vocal one marks Huck's other important
relationship-- that between himself and Tom Sawyer, to whomHuck has always
been subservient. Huck's cooperation in Jim's dehumanization is not
total. It is pierced with mumblingdisquiet as the degradationbecomes
moreoutre. "That warn't
the plan"; "there ain't no necessityfor it";
"we're going to get into trouble with Aunt Polly"; "...if you'll take my advice";
"what's the sense in..."; "Confound it, it's foolish, Tom";
"Jim's too old. . . . He won't last";
"How long Will it take.?"; "It's one of the most jackass ideas I ever
struck." But these objectionsare not enough. Ourapprehensionas
we follow the free fall of the father is only mildly subduedby our satisfaction at the unmanacled exit of the freedman. Tom Sawyer's
silence about Jim's legal status is perverse.So
perverse that the fact that Huck never speaks of or considers returning
to his hometown to carry on with his erstwhilebest
friend(this time in safety and with money
of his own) but wants to leave civilization altogetheris morethan understandable.
Huck cannot have an enduring relationshipwith Jim; he refuses one with Tom.

The source of my
unease reading this amazing, troublingbook now seems clear: an imperfect
coming to terms with three matters Twain addresses-- Huck Finn's
estrangement, soleness and morbidityas an outcast child; the disproportionate
sadness at the center of Jim's and his relationship;and
the secrecy in which Huck's engagementwith
(ratherthan escape from) a racist society
is necessarily conducted. It is also clear that the rewardsof my effortto
come to termshave been abundant.My alarm, aroused by Twain's precise rendering
of childhood'sfear
of death and abandonment, remains-- as it should. It has been extremely
worthwhile slogging through Jim's shame and humiliation to recognize
the sadness, the tragic implicationsat the centerof his
relationshipwith Huck. My fury at the
maze of deceit,the risk of personal harm
that a white child is forcedto negotiate
in a race-inflected society, is dissipated by the exquisite uses to
which Twain puts that maze, that risk.

Yet the larger
question,the
danger that sifts from the novel's last page, is whether Huck, minus
Jim, will be able to stay those threemonstersas he entersthe
"territory." Will that undefined space, so falsely imagined as "open,"
be free of social chaos, personal morbidity, and further moral
complications embedded in adulthoodand citizenship?

Will it be free
not only of nightmare fathers but of dream fathers too? Twain did not
write Huck there. He imagined instead a reunion-- Huck, Jim and Tom,
soaring in a balloon over Egypt.

For a hundred
years, the argument that this novel is has been
identified, reidentified, examined, waged
and advanced. What it cannot be is dismissed. It is classic literature,
which is to say it heaves, manifests and lasts.